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http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=SARSVACCINE-04-07-03&cat=WW
WASHINGTON
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No vaccine for SARS seen anytime soon
By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
April 07, 2003
WASHINGTON - Under the best of circumstances, it will be more than a year before even an experimental vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome will be available, the nation's top infectious-disease researcher told Congress Monday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told a Senate health panel that while it's "not 100 percent certain" that a new strain of coronavirus is behind the outbreak that has killed more than 100 people and infected more than 2,600 worldwide, "I'm confident enough to go ahead with the research."
Fauci said he is encouraged that, unlike many viruses in the same family, the newly isolated virus strain can be fairly easily cultured in monkey cells, which means it will be possible to produced a "killed virus" vaccine that could be tested on animals in several months.
"But I don't think there's any chance we'll have a first-generation vaccine for use in people by this time next year," Fauci said.
David Heymann, director of communicable diseases for the World Health Organization, said Fauci's lab is the only one in the world that he is aware of already working on a vaccine against the new disease, with others concentrating on developing diagnostic tests and perhaps treatments for the illness.
Fauci also said his agency is collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease to screen existing "off-the-shelf" anti-viral drugs and therapies that might be effective in fighting SARS.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, said no effective treatment for the illness has been found so far, noting that early reports that the anti-viral drug ribavirin had helped some patients may turn out to be true.
She said a new attitude of cooperation by Chinese officials should help researchers better understand the nature of the disease, how it's spread and who is most at risk of getting infected. So far, she said, the evidence seems to indicate that middle-aged people are most likely to become severely ill.
As of Monday, the United States reported 148 suspected cases of SARS in 30 states, but no deaths. Gerberding stressed that the United States is using a much broader definition of SARS infections than is the World Health Organization, considering anyone who recently traveled to Asia and suffering otherwise unexplained respiratory illness with a fever to possibly have the disease.
World Health Organization officials are only counting patients who have developed pneumonia to be confirmed cases, and that difference means that many suspected American cases are less severely ill to start with, and thus less likely to die.
Worldwide, about 4 percent of people with SARS have died, and some disease investigators think fatalities may be linked to contact with individuals who are particularly contagious.
Gerberding said that relatively quick action by U.S. officials to set up health alert teams at airports and notify hospital emergency rooms and other front-line health providers to the threat and to place suspected cases in isolation rooms have helped keep the illness to a minimum.
Fauci said at this point, it's not clear what the source of the disease is, although it's thought to originate in domestic or wild animals in China. Nor is it clear just how easily the disease is spread, although it's clearly being passed from person to person.
Researchers don't know whether the disease will turn out to be seasonal, or even if it will become less contagious as it moves from one person to another. So far, World Health Organization officials have documented the disease moving along a chain only four people long.
"SARS for sure is not just a blip on the radar screen," Fauci said. "But we don't know where it will go, so we have to take it very, very seriously until we do."
On the Net: www.cdc.gov
www.who.int
www.niaid.nih.gov
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(Contact Lee Bowman at BowmanL(at)shns.com or online at http://www.shns.com)
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